The Incredible Hulk

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Reviews

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A more accessible and less heavy-handed movie than Ang Lee’s 2003 HulkLouis Leterrier’s The Incredible Hulk is a purely popcorn love affair with Marvel’s raging, green superhero, as well as the old television series starring Bill Bixby as Dr. David Banner and Lou Ferrigno as the beast within him. Edward Norton takes up where Eric Bana left off in Lee’s version, playing Bruce (that’s the character’s original name) Banner, a haunted scientist always on the move. Trying to eliminate the effects of a military experiment that turns him into the Hulk whenever his emotions get the better of him, Banner is hiding out in Brazil at the film’s beginning. Working in a bottling plant and communicating via email with an unidentified professor who thinks he can help, Banner goes postal when General Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross and a small army turn up to grab him. Intent on developing whatever causes Banner’s metamorphoses into a weapon, Ross brings along a quietly deranged soldier named Emil Blonsky (Tim Roth), who wants Ross to turn him into a supersoldier who can take on the Hulk. The adventure spreads to the U.S., where Banner hooks up with his old lover (and Ross’ daughter), Betty (Liv Tyler), and where the Hulk takes on several armed assaults, including one in a pretty unusual location: a college campus. The film’s action is impressive, though the computer-generated creature is disappointingly cartoonish, and a second monster turning up late in the movie looks even cheesier. Norton is largely wasted in the film—he’s essentially a bridge between sequences where he disappears and the Hulk rampages around. As good an actor as he is, Norton doesn’t have the charisma here to carry those scenes in which one waits impatiently for the real show to begin. —Tom Keogh